Wine Is Drop in the Bucket of Skid Row Woe : Homeless: If the anesthetic of ‘short dogs’ isn’t available, people enduring the pain of life on the street will find some other ticket to oblivion.

On Christmas Eve a few years back, Doc was sitting on a bench by the window, discreetly sipping Mickey Malt Liquor from a plastic cup that he replenished from a 42-ounce bottle in a paper bag at his feet. It was raining, but we were warm and safe inside the Laundromat, most of us tending to our laundry, a few of us just seeking shelter. Doc had a little radio, and Christmas carols filled the air.

The regulars, “the good people” doing their laundry, knew Doc and exchanged holiday greetings. Otherwise, it was quiet. Until Trouble came in.

With long matted hair and blood just beginning to dry on his face from a recent adventure, Trouble looked mean. He was drunk enough to not hurt and sober enough to stand up for more. Everyone kept to themselves. No one wanted anything to do with Trouble. But then, six feet from where I was standing, Trouble grabbed the collar of a short Mexican boy, probably no older than 16. The boy spoke no English, but the fear in his eyes as Trouble reared back his free fist said it all.

“Leave him alone!” I shouted before I had a chance to feel the boy’s fear myself. Trouble turned, released the boy, and stared hard, unblinking, into my eyes. We started the slow circle-dance of fighting roosters, sizing up one another. The good people were trying hard to avoid his attention, but he abruptly turned away from me and began hitting them up for quarters and dimes.

After about 10 minutes, he got back to the Mexican boy. Again, hand on collar, fist reared back to fly. I shouted again, and Trouble and I danced again.

Then Doc chimed in: “Come on, you cause trouble all the time. Someone’s gonna call the cops, then I gotta go back in the rain, and the Mexicans gotta clear out, and you ruin it for everyone. And on Christmas Eve.”

Trouble moved away to panhandle some newcomers, and Doc said to me, “You’re all right. What’s your name?”

“Marty,” I answered.

“Well, Marty, have a cup of coffee.” Doc offered me a cup black from the filth on his hand, filled with still-steaming coffee. It had been given to him by a regular. “Everyone’s always buying me coffee,” Doc explained, “but I can’t drink coffee, makes me sick. Liquor makes my bad leg feel better. Can’t get any real medicine.”

As I folded my laundry, he told me his sad story, possibly true, possibly not, of his long decline from medical practice to his life on the streets. First denying a drinking problem, then admitting it.

Trouble interrupted; he wanted Doc’s bottle. Doc threatened him, insulted him and generally asserted his superiority as an educated man. Trouble was young and strong, Doc was old and sick but perhaps emboldened by my company. Finally, Doc gave Trouble a dollar bill. “Go get your own instead of bothering all the good people here.”

“You got enough there for a ‘short dog’,” I told Trouble, hoping he’d leave us alone. He grinned. “Yeah!” There was a convenience store right across the street. He asked me, his recent nemesis, to help him get across safely.

A few minutes later, he returned on his own with a paper bag. He twisted off the cap and sipped his wine, finally finding the peace of the season, sitting off by himself, content as an infant with his bottle. We all felt more at ease.

And so it is with mixed feelings that I view the recent decision by the Gallo company to cut back distribution of its fortified wines in neighborhoods that transients and homeless folks frequent. The end of the short dog is not the end of the social problem of intoxicated homeless people. The homeless will get the money for more expensive bottles, if more expensive bottles are all there are. Some may turn to other, more toxic substances--Sterno, for example.

Sure, drink put some of these people in the gutter. But a lot of them don’t start drinking until they’re in the gutter. Drink may keep some of them there, and it certainly helps many of them die there. But removing access to cheap, high-alcohol-content wine will not end the need for it. It means panhandling longer hours, stealing more car stereos, more violent crime among the homeless as they try to get the scratch for booze. It means that we good people can pretend that a problem has been solved without spending any of the money we work hard for.

The short dog is the best cheap, fast ride out of hell. The hell of being drunk “on the nickel” is the only heaven many of these people will ever know. Their hell is being sober on the street. The short dog is the only antidote they know for the pain they suffer. The short dog gives the peace to sleep at night and the courage to face tomorrow. It is a lullaby in mother’s arms, the opera, a day in the country, all at once.

Shopkeepers have the legal obligation not to sell to habitual drunks in a state of intoxication, but they do not have the right to discriminate by the customer’s residence. As a ticket to oblivion, the $1.19 short dog on Skid Row is the same as the $25 bottle of Scotch in Hancock Park.

The real solution to alcoholism on Skid Row isn’t to manipulate the liquor market. It is to intervene at the root of the problem, which is the despair of homelessness. And there is no one method that will work. The homeless population is a great mass of highly individual suffering: the mentally ill, the economically dispossessed, habitual substance abusers, the physically ill, women, children, people born on the streets, former “good people” who never thought they would end up there, to name just a few. For the price of a B-2 bomber, we could set up effective intervention programs to redirect many of these lives. It’s too easy and self-deluding to be content with the largely symbolic and totally ineffective withdrawal of the short dog.